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Your body has about 650 muscles.
It doesn't matter that you only care about four or five of them. You
need every one in order to perform the normal functions of everyday
life—eating, breathing, walking, holding in your stomach at the
beach.

Granted, you don't need to spend a lot of time thinking about most of your muscles. The 200 muscles involved in walking do the job whether you monitor them or not.

You could try to impress your friends at parties by telling them the
gluteus maximus is the body's strongest muscle, or that the latissimus
dorsi (in your middle back) is the largest, or that a middle-ear muscle
called the stapedius is the smallest. But it probably won't work,
unless you have some really unusual friends. And muscle trivia
can't capture the wonder of muscles themselves—the brilliance of
coordinated muscles in motion, the magnificence of well-developed
muscles in isolation.

We hope, in the following story, to help you understand a little more about how your muscles work,
and thus how to make them bigger, stronger, and more aesthetically
pleasing (if you're into that sort of thing). You can accomplish all
three, if you know what's going on beneath the surface.